16th May 2011 Archive

It doesn't take any insight at all – or the analysts at Gartner – to figure out which operating system supplier is the largest. It's Microsoft, of course. But which ones are numbers two, three, and four? And which is the fastest-growing maker of operating systems? The answers might surprise you.

The revelation that US commandos who stormed Osama bin Laden's Pakistan bolthole unearthed a "massive smut stash" didn't much surprise those who'd been expecting news that the terrorist wasn't quite the paragon of Islamic virtue he claimed to be.

There are a number of different annoying things about the fanless GPU co-processors that Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices are peddling as adjunct computational engines for servers. First, these Tesla and FireStream co-processors, as their lines are respectively known, cost more than regular GPUs. And they also have a different set of drivers that deprecate their use as a graphics card.

The Sun has thrown its weight behind an attempt to ID everyone who was at Wembley for Saturday's FA Cup Final, and who were captured in an impressive 360° hi-res picture as they cheered on Manchester City and Stoke City.

A rising tide lifts all boats and the blessing EMC gave to all-flash arrays at EMC World will be gratefully seized upon by a string of established small players and start-up wannabees such as Pure Storage and SolidFire. But this tide could carry some boats into turbulent waters.

The PlayBook is described by makers RIM as the first professional-grade tablet. RIM, of course, is best known for its e-mail handset, the BlackBerry. A good deal larger and minus the distinctive keyboard, RIM’s Playbook is a handsome machine, well-designed and with great build quality.

Family and supporters of Gary McKinnon remain confident that their campaign against his extradition to the US will ultimately prove successful, despite the insistence of a senior Obama government law official that the alleged hacker ought to stand trial in the US.

It's about 10 years since I rigged up dynamic DNS in my apartment in San Francisco so I could play my music library remotely. I suspect many of you have tried something similar, and many more have subsequently used Orb or a Slingbox to achieve the same goal.

If we wrote stories for every concept design that crossed our desks, we wouldn't have time to bring you much else. Some designs are worth a mention, though, and this idea of a fully customisable keyboard certainly raises a few eyebrows.

The Obama administration is looking to make hacking attacks against critical infrastructure systems punishable by a mandatory three years imprisonment. It also wants an Act normally applied to mobsters to be applied to online criminals too.

The Register is offering its beloved readers the chance to win free tickets to Yahoo!'s fourth-annual Hadoop Summit, a one-day confab dedicated to the open source distributed number-crunching platform.

Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are not the only ones innovating in the x64 chip racket. VIA Technologies has carved out a niche for itself for low-powered chips suitable for netbooks, small form factor PCs, micro servers, and other embedded devices, and is double-stuffing its sockets with the QuadCore X4 chips to better compete with Intel's Atom and AMD's future "Bobcat" processors.

The vast majority of devices running Google's Android operating system are vulnerable to attacks that allow adversaries to steal the digital credentials used to access calendars, contacts, and other sensitive data stored on the search giant's servers, university researchers have warned.

The founders of Mono – an effort to build an open source version of Microsoft's .NET platform – have launched a new company around the project, just fourteen days after they were laid off by new Novell owner Attachmate.